29 June 2013

The series now beginning on this Communist University forum attempts
to show how it is finally on the battlefield of Philosophy that the struggle
for freedom is won or lost. It shows that this battlefield is a Freirean
battlefield. It is the crucial battle of the free-willing human Subject,
otherwise known as “The Subject of History”.

Our course attempts to show that some of the philosophical
touchstones or “shibboleths” of the communist movement have been terribly
mistaken. It shows that the opposition of idealism to materialism, where the
latter is supposed to eliminate the former, is not dialectical.

What is dialectical is the counterposition of the human with
the material world. These two can never be collapsed into one, so long as human
life continues. One does not eliminate the other. Hence this is a true
dialectic: a unity and struggle of opposites.

In retrospect it seems clear that at the time of the Great
October Revolution in 1917 in Russia there was a philosophical deficit among
the revolutionaries; and that this philosophical deficit got worse as time went
on; and that this weakness eventually undermined the revolution and caused it
to topple.

We will succeed or fail in the future in proportion to our
grasp of philosophy.

Philosophy is a beautiful study, and nothing to fear.

Illustration: “Question Everything!” – the sometime logo of
the Communist University of London